Current Projectshttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/current-projects
enVideo: EDSAC Project Trustees review and planhttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/edsac/video-trustees-meet-review-and-plan
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Two-thirds of the way though the EDSAC project, trustees meet to review progress and consider plans for the grand opening.</p>
<p>The reconstruction of the 1949 stored program computer is on track and its huge educational potential beckons.</p>
<iframe width="448" height="267" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RW-lqak7ZWM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<h2><a href="/special-projects/edsac/project-videos">More videos of the EDSAC reconstruction project</a>.</h2>
</div></div></div>Tue, 10 Mar 2015 09:42:55 +0000stephen.fleming867 at http://www.tnmoc.orgVideo of opening of EDSAC Galleryhttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/edsac/video-opening-edsac-gallery
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Hermann Hauser, entrepreneur and EDSAC Project Chairman, has officially opened the EDSAC display at The National Museum of Computing.</p>
<p>As key parts of the reconstruction of one the most influential computers ever built were commissioned, the sights, sounds, heat and sheer size of computing in the late 1940s were brought to life.</p>
<p>The opening of the EDSAC Gallery (better quality video to be available in due course).</p>
<iframe width="462" height="264" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Fy4JXMZdcHI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></div></div>Wed, 21 Jan 2015 17:30:05 +0000stephen.fleming836 at http://www.tnmoc.orgHermann Hauser opens EDSAC displayhttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/edsac/hermann-hauser-opens-edsac-display-and-switch
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Hermann Hauser, entrepreneur and EDSAC Project Chairman, has officially opened the EDSAC display at The National Museum of Computing and, as key parts of the reconstruction of one the most influential computers ever built were commissioned, the sights, sounds, heat and sheer size of computing in the late 1940s were brought to life. Already the machine is proving to be a very popular exhibit and is a marvel and an inspiration to visiting educational groups.</p>
<iframe width="448" height="267" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/qCJXGDZFl2I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><em>Video of the entire event coming soon.</em></p>
<p>EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was originally built in the University of Cambridge immediately after World War II by a team led by Sir Maurice Wilkes. It was the first practical general purpose computer and marked the beginning of computer programming as a distinct profession. EDSAC was so successful that it was used in Nobel prize-winning scientific research and its design was later developed to create LEO, the world's first business computer.</p>
<p>After two years of research and re-engineering by a team of about 20 volunteers, the EDSAC reconstruction is now becoming a reality that is already fascinating visitors to the Museum.</p>
<p>At the official opening of the exhibit, several key elements of EDSAC were demonstrated. Bill Purvis showed how a program would be input before the advent of keyboards and how the result would be output before screens became commonplace. Peter Linnington revealed how, at the start of the computer age, delay lines were used as stores. As the climax, Chris Burton switched on the EDSAC clock, the beating heart of the machine.</p>
<p>The three-year project is on schedule for completion late next year and computer historian Martin Campbell-Kelly gave a preview of what is in store by outlining the importance of EDSAC in marking the beginnings of computer programming. He revealed plans for young people to create and run their own programs on one of the world’s most influential early computers.</p>
<p>Andrew Herbert, leader of the EDSAC Project, said: “Reconstructing EDSAC is proving to be a fascinating challenge with lots of surprises. We are incredibly fortunate to be able to call of a volunteer team with an extraordinarily rare skill set. The team includes students of the original computer pioneers and members of the last generation to be trained in the use of thermionic valves, the key component of EDSAC which has 3,000 of them!</p>
<p>“But even with those rare skills, the task is not straightforward. Our skilled team has to forget knowledge that it painstakingly acquired in the development of later landmark machines like the 1950’s Ferranti Pegasus and the 1960’s Elliott computers. We don’t have blueprints to follow, so to create an authentic EDSAC we have to adopt a 1940’s mindset to re-engineer, redesign the machine. We face the same challenges as those remarkable pioneers who succeeded in building a machine that transformed computing.”</p>
<p>Doron Swade, co-founder of the Computer Conservation Society and a hands-on pioneer of computer restoration, said: “This is truly a remarkable project that brings history to life for its participants and for the viewing public. EDSAC provided, for the first time, reliable computing capability for scientists. It could be said that EDSAC invented the user as a distinct class of practitioner. To have a working reconstruction of the computer that trail-blazed both programming practices and computational services for scientific research cannot fail to interest casual observers and more importantly inspire young people with their careers ahead of them. It shows that computer conservation is flourishing and contributing real value in the modern world.”</p>
<p><strong>Notes To Editors</strong></p>
<p><strong>1 EDSAC</strong></p>
<p>EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was built immediately after World War II by a team led by Sir Maurice Wilkes in the Mathematical Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. It was the first practical general purpose computers and was used by scientific researchers across the University. The EDSAC design was later developed to create LEO, the world's first business computer.</p>
<ul>
<li>EDSAC was based on the ideas of J Presper Eckert, John Mauchley and John von Neumann who in 1945 suggested that the future of computing lay in computers which could store sets of instructions (programs) as well as data in a memory and demonstrated early computing circuits in the ENIAC electronic calculator.</li>
<li>EDSAC was over two metres high and occupied a ground area of four metres by five metres.</li>
<li>Pre-dating the transistor, its 3000+ thermionic valves / vacuum tubes used as logic were arranged on 12 racks containing just over 140 chassis in total.</li>
<li>Mercury-filled tubes were used for the main memory, comprising 512 words initially, later 1024 word (equivalent to 2KB/4KB of PC storage).</li>
<li>It performed 650 instructions per second, effectively computing more than 1500 times faster than the mechanical calculators it replaced.</li>
<li>EDSAC read in programs from paper tape and printed its results on a teleprinter.</li>
<li>EDSAC ran its first program on 6 May 1949 and soon after that began nine years of regular service for scientific users across the University of Cambridge and other institutions, ending in July 1958 when it was dismantled to enable the re-use of precious space. By then it had been superseded by the faster and much larger EDSAC 2.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>2 The EDSAC Reconstruction Project</strong></p>
<p>The EDSAC Reconstruction Project which began in 2011 is expected to be completed in late 2015. The reconstructed EDSAC, which will occupy 20 square metres, is being built at The National Museum of Computing, where visitors can see the work in progress. The EDSAC Replica Project has been funded by a consortium of corporate and private donors led by Hermann Hauser.</p>
<p>The ongoing reconstruction story featuring videos of progress can be seen at <a href="http://www.edsac.org">www.edsac.org</a></p>
<p><strong>3 About The National Museum of Computing</strong></p>
<p>The National Museum of Computing, located on Bletchley Park, is an independent charity housing the world's largest collection of functional historic computers, including the rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer, and the WITCH, the world's oldest working digital computer. The Museum enables visitors to follow the development of computing from the ultra-secret pioneering efforts of the 1940s through the large systems and mainframes of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s and beyond.</p>
<p>A pledge by an individual benefactor of £1 million if matched funding is found means that every pound or dollar donated to the Museum will count double. Previous funders of the Museum have included Bletchley Park Capital Partners, Bloomberg, CreateOnline, Ceravision, InsightSoftware.com, Ocado Technology, 4Links, Google UK, IBM, NPL, HP Labs, and BCS.</p>
<p>The whole Museum is currently open to the public on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 12 noon, spring and summer Bank Holidays and increasingly during school holidays. Colossus and Tunny galleries are open almost every day. Guided tours are available at 2pm on Tuesdays. There are often additional opening times for the public -- see the website or the iPhone app for updates. Educational and corporate groups are very welcome and may be on any day or evening by prior arrangement.</p>
<p>For more information, see <a href="http://www.tnmoc.org">www.tnmoc.org</a> and follow @tnmoc on Twitter and The National Museum of Computing on Facebook and Google+. A TNMOC iPhone App is also now available from the iPhone App Store.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 27 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000stephen.fleming811 at http://www.tnmoc.orgEDSAC commissioning preparationshttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/edsac/commissioning-preparations-opening-edsac-display
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Filmed in advance of the opening of the EDSAC display at TNMOC, the challenges of commissioning the reconstruction may surprise you. It's cottage industry combined with engineering ingenuity - some of it even happens in an "Edshack". Martin Campbell-Kelly talks of the educational plans to involve youngsters learning to program.</p>
<h2>Commissioning preparations for the opening of the EDSAC display</h2>
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</div></div></div>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000stephen.fleming816 at http://www.tnmoc.orgEDSAC passes half-way infrastructure milestonehttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/edsac/edsac-passes-50-infrastructure-milestone
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>A milestone was reached this week: 70 of the EDSAC chassis are now in place -- that's 50% of the total. Later this month, the display will be officially declared open by Hermann Hauser and the first parts of the machine will be commissioned.</p>
<p>The EDSAC project is on schedule for completion towards the end of 2015. In February this year, all 12 of the tall metal racks which support the individual chassis of electronics had been manufactured and installed. Each rack can hold up to 14 chassis and it is expected that a total of 142 chassis will be required. Seventy of them were in place this week and many have been tested in standalone form. Further systems level testing is being done as each chassis is connected into its place in the computer.</p>
<p>Workshops, sheds and even at their kitchen tables across the country have been called into action to build and test each chassis. Each takes a skilled volunteer five to ten days to assemble, wire and check, so that means that the chassis assembly work alone for the whole of EDSAC will have taken between three and four person-years.</p>
<p>The next milestone will be later this month when the input and output will be demonstrated with the help of a very modern piece of kit -- a Raspberry Pi.</p>
<p>Visitors to the Museum can see EDSAC progress <a href="/visit">any time the Museum is open to the general public</a>. On weekdays, school groups from across the country are amazed to see the huge technology that preceded their smartphones.</p>
<p>A complete set of short top quality videos tracing the Project's progress can be found <a href="/special-projects/edsac/project-videos">on You Tube</a>. The videos have been made by David Allen, producer of the 1980's computer literacy BBC TV series.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 05 Nov 2014 17:01:01 +0000stephen.fleming800 at http://www.tnmoc.orgEDSAC commissioning beginshttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/edsac/edsac-commissioning-begins
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>EDSAC commissioning began this week by connecting some of the independently-built "sub-systems".</p>
<p>EDSAC Project volunteers, John Pratt, John Sanderson and Peter Lawrence, successfully connected the clock and digit pulse generator system in rack M3 to the “tank flashing” or store address decoding system in rack F3.</p>
<p>There is now an interconnected chassis in the front and middle row of racks, confirming that both subsystems, the inter-rack wiring and the power distribution system are working together.</p>
<p>The next step is to try to connect the flashing system to the storage regeneration system.</p>
<p>The order decoding system, the arithmetic unit, coincidence (computer-store synchronisation) and transfer unit (the delay line connecting output bus to input bus) are all showing good progress.</p>
<p>The EDSAC reconstruction is expected to be ready in late 2015. Next month the EDSAC display, complete with interpretive signage, will be officially opened by Hermann Hauser, chairman of the EDSAC Replica Project.</p>
<p>The ongoing reconstruction of EDSAC can be seen <a href="g/visit/opening-times">when TNMOC is open to the public</a>.</p>
<p>A complete set of short top quality videos tracing the Project's progress can be found <a href="/special-projects/edsac/project-videos">on You Tube</a>. The videos have been made by David Allen, producer of the 1980's computer literacy BBC TV series.</p>
<p>Here is the the overview video of the project as a taster:</p>
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</div></div></div>Tue, 21 Oct 2014 23:00:00 +0000stephen.fleming783 at http://www.tnmoc.orgBill Tutte's algorithm runs againhttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/robinson/bill-tutte-algorithm-runs-again-robinson
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>For the first time since the end of World War II, the 1+2 Double Delta algorithm was successfully performed on the balanced modulator logic circuits of the Robinson machine -- but on the ongoing reconstruction this time.</p>
<p>The Double Delta algorithm was a statistical attack devised by Bill Tutte in 1942 to find the Lorenz wheel start positions. Bill Tutte had previously deduced how the <a href="/explore/tunny-gallery">Lorenz machine</a> worked without ever having seen it. Tutte's feat is often given the accolade of being the greatest intellectual achievement of World War II.</p>
<p>Max Newman, head of the Newmanry, which aimed to industrialise code-breaking, approached TRE at Malvern to design an electronic machine to implement Tutte's Double-Delta method of finding wheel start positions. The resulting machine was built at Dollis Hill and subsequently used at Bletchley Park. It was known as Heath Robinson after the cartoonist designer of fantastic machines and was the predecessor of Colossus.</p>
<p>For the Robinson to perform the Double-Delta attack, one tape had punched on to it the pure Lorenz wheel patterns that the manual code breakers had laboriously worked out. The other tape was the intercepted enciphered message tape. The Double-Delta cross-correlation measurement was then made for the whole length of the message tape. The relative positions then moved one character and the correlation measurement repeated. The code-breaker was looking for the relative position which gave the highest cross-correlation score — which hopefully would correspond to the correct Lorenz wheel start position.</p>
<p>For details of the logic test, see <a href="/special-projects/robinson/robinson-technology/testing-results">here</a>.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 20 Oct 2014 23:00:00 +0000stephen.fleming782 at http://www.tnmoc.orgTransputer Project underwayhttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/transputers/transputer-project-underway
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Two TNMOC volunteers have embarked on a restoration project of two Inmos Transputer Development System units. In the longer term, they plan to to restore a large system based around a network of 100 T9000 Transputers originally used for fast data capture at CERN.</p>
<p>The Inmos Transputer was a British-designed, novel parallel microprocessor architecture from the early 1980s. The Transputer was unique in that each processor had a built-in simple operating system, memory and four high speed (20 Mbit/s full duplex) bi-directional serial links. The Transputer is essentially a computer system on a chip. The links on the Transputer allow connection to up to four other Transputers or peripherals such as video graphics, floppy and hard disc drives, Ethernet networking and standard RS-232 serial ports.</p>
<p>Amongst other influences, evolutions of the transputer link technology have been promoted by 4Links in SpaceWire technology that is being designed into more than 100 satellites.</p>
<p>You can read about project progress <a href="/special-projects/transputer/restoration-0">here</a>.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 30 Sep 2014 14:45:07 +0000stephen.fleming774 at http://www.tnmoc.orgDonors welcome!http://www.tnmoc.org/news/project-block-h/donors-welcome
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>As part of the 70th anniversary of Block H, the first results of an embryo project to recreate a virtual 1940’s Block H was revealed to the Colossus veterans. Their response was enthusiastic and very informative, helping to fill in some of the details of this very important heritage building in those top-secret days. We are now planning to take the prototype and develop a full project.</p>
<p>Project Block H is currently seeking funding. If you would like to donate, you can <a href="https://www.justgiving.com/nationalmuseumofcomputing">do so on JustGiving here</a> or by sponsoring a valve on <a href="http://colossusonline.org/">Colossonline here</a>.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 23:00:00 +0000stephen.fleming775 at http://www.tnmoc.orgRobinson valve amplifier testinghttp://www.tnmoc.org/news/robinson/robinson-valve-amplifier-testing
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The valves in Robinson serve two main purposes:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>they amplify the tiny electrical signals from the photo-electric cells that read the two paper tapes in the same way that valves have been used to amplify the tiny signal from the pickup on the old vinyl record players to a level that could drive a loudspeaker</p></li>
<li><p>they perform a mathematical-type function on the amplified data from the two paper tapes to try to tease out some vital information about the suspected key. (Tommy Flowers realised that valves could perform logical operations thousands of times faster than relays and mechanical switches and this eventually led to Colossus.)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Here is Charles Coultas of the Robinson Rebuild team testing the valve amplifier:</p>
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</div></div></div>Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:58:11 +0000stephen.fleming724 at http://www.tnmoc.org